[postgis-devel] PSC Vote: Stop installing liblwgeom INCLUDES in system

[Greg Troxel]

"Regina Obe" <lr at pcorp.us> writes:

>> In the modern world where almost all use of any successful program is
>> via packaging systems, having other parts of postgis also depend
>> (theoretically unnecessarily) on things that other parts actually
>> depend on does not hurt.


> Well to me it hurts when we have to drag in CGAL /Boost / etc. just
> because postgis_sfcgal needs it.  It hurts that I can't just package
> my commandline tools without them relying on CGAL/Boost when they have
> 0 need for them.

[I hope this still remains  on the good side of the helpful/annoying
line...]

pkgsrc is focused on building from source, so the notion that you can
depend on all those things and then bundle them up separately does not
really make as much sense as a world in which 99.99% of the people use
binary packages built by somebody else.

There are three separate problems with big dependencies:

1) if they don't build the entire package is broken

2) it can take a long time to build them

3) people installing binary packages have to install them

to me, #3 is generally the least serious of these, unless it's some
small program needing qt5.  But I realize others and other systems see
it differently.

But, if sfcgal is judged to be too heavy (relative to a system which is
already running postgresql and has geos, which means it's fairly big and
can handle C++11), maybe we should rethink using it in the first place.

> From a packaging perspective you can break up the postgis package much
> more easily if you don't have these needless dependencies.

If one can build separate pieces with separate builds, as if they are
separate packages, then these things become less serious.  But that
doesn't seem to be the case here.  Basically, I see "you must install
all the dependencies to build, and then you can split them" as not
really addressing the big issues.

> Whether packagers do that or not they are free to decide just as they
> are free to decide what bits of PostGIS they want to compile.

Sure, but there is an obligation to users to package it the way it
should be, which does get tricky with big optional depenencies.